Peter Smith

Peter Smith is a lawyer who works in central London. He has previously worked in Parliament for Edward Leigh MP.

Next week, George Osborne will announce the result of
the triennial Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR). CSRs are the big brother to
Departmental Spending Reviews, where ministries consider their goals over the
short- and middle-term and match slices of the funding pie to policies which –
they hope – will be instruments to achieve desired outcomes.

In financial terms, DSRs aren’t truly zero-sum. Although
interest groups within any particular ministry will lobby for their pet
projects, there is always a little give around the whole pie. In the MoD, for instance, the media hype up tensions between the Army, Navy
and Air Force, but when the chips are down the whole lot can demand cash off
the Treasury.

In contrast, the pie can’t really grow for the CSR. The
Treasury has no bigger hand to feed it, as it raises money direct from us, the
tax payer, and from the bond market. Neither is particularly forgiving when Mr
Osborne asks for more moolah, especially during a recession.

The Chancellor will this year sit in a Star Chamber to hear
Secretaries of State make their pitches for cash. To an extent he is balancing
apples with pears and bananas, aircraft carriers with housing benefit and
bobbies on the beat. The quid pro quo
for bearing the risk and getting the blend wrong, is that One Horse Guards can
set departmental public sector agreements (PSAs) - targets to you and me.

Peter Smith is a lawyer who works in central London. He has previously worked in Parliament for Edward Leigh MP.

The first of April saw two new
books launched on the perennial problem of large-scale, permanent migration
into Britain. Despite the inauspicious publication date, their authors are no
fools. They demonstrate that the gap between intellectual Left and Right has
now narrowed substantially on the question of immigration.

Ed West’s The Diversity Illusion sets out,
blow-by-blow and in a racy journalistic style, the social and cultural impact
of foreign settlement. West, who writes for a bevy of titles including The Spectator and Daily Telegraph, seeks to explain, as the subtitles put it, what we
got wrong about immigration and how to set it right.

From the Left, David Goodhart, the
former editor of liberal Prospect magazine
and now head of Demos, examines in The British Dream “the tension
between solidarity and diversity in rich, liberal societies”. His conclusion is
much the same as West’s, but delivered with the additional force of an apostate
condemning his religion.

“[U]nlike most members of my
political tribe of north London liberals I have come to believe that public
opinion is broadly right about the immigration story. Britain has had too much
of it, too quickly, especially in recent years, and much of it, especially for
the least well off, has not produced self-evidence economic benefit.”

The migration both authors consider
fits broadly into two historical trends. From the end of the Second World War
until the mid-1990s, about four million ethnic minority Britons either moved or
were born here to migrant parents. Most came from former colonies and
particularly the Caribbean, India, Pakistan or Africa.

Peter Smith is a lawyer who works in central London. He has previously worked in Parliament, for Edward Leigh MP.

The move
to bar direct and indirect forms of discrimination over the past 50 years has
been, to a great degree, welcome progress. Without doubt it is perniciously
unfair to discriminate against people on grounds of their race, and the same is
largely true of discrimination because of sex, age or disability (although
valid qualifications exist, such as the current ban on women in the infantry,
which may yet change).

What has
become apparent, however, is that when it comes to sexual orientation, many
people consider homosexual acts to be morally wrong. I accept this is a blunt
statement for many reasons, but the essence of this view stems from a wider
understanding of the magnificence of heterosexual acts in the promises of
lifelong marriage, complementarity between the sexes, and the creation and
nurturing of new human life. For many people, such views stem from orthodox
religious beliefs, and they may be mediated through appeals to historical
tradition, reason, nature, and experience.

Yet how
is the dynamic of equality represented in same-sex marriage to fare when it
clashes with mainstream Christian, Muslim and Jewish views on human sexuality?
Where does the equality agenda go now?